A video circulating on Facebook that shows President William Ruto being rebuked at the African Food Summit is altered.
The video shows Kenya’s President sitting silently as a man sitting next to him dressed in white criticizes him.
In the background of the two men are the logos of the African Food Summit, also known as Dakar 2 Summit, and the African Development Bank. The bank and the government of Senegal were co-hosts of the conference which was held from 25 to 27 January 2023.
The video in the claim has audio that reads:
“I want you to go back to your country and fix your country. The leader of the opposition is crying hard that you stole his votes. Go back to your country and fix your country. Peace in your country is more powerful than this summit of feeding Africa. So er… the person who is supposed to be the president now is lamenting back in Kenya.
Even if you frown at me, I can hear you are listening to church songs with your earphones, just go back to your country. Go back to your country and open the servers the way the leader of the opposition is saying. Actually, he is not the leader of the opposition, he is supposed to be the President. There were reports that you stole the votes, so even if you look at me like that, go back to Kenya, fix your country. They are marching to the State House to overthrow you.
Just go back to your county. Stop fidgeting. Go back, fix Kenya. Go back open the servers. Let everybody have justice. We all know that you never won that election. I have been a president, I know all this, you are a young man to me. So you just go back to your country and make sure Raila Odinga gets his justice. Even if you frown, that’s the reality. So stop looking at me like that. Go back to Kenya and that’s what I’m telling you. Right away. Are we together?”
The audio, however, appears to be out of sync with what the speaker on screen is saying.
We checked the conference website for videos and photos of the event and found the original video was taken during the conference’s opening panel. The man dressed in white seated on President Ruto’s right side is the Prime Minister of Niger, Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou.
An English version of the opening ceremony posted on YouTube includes an English translation of Mahamadou’s remarks. He was speaking about a Niger-based programme called the 3N Initiative, or Nigeriens Nourish Nigeriens.
Contrary to the claim in question, Mahamadou spoke in French throughout the session and there is no mention of Kenya’s 2022 general elections in the English translation.
Here is the official audio English translation of his words:
“Thank you very much. I would like first to pass on the greetings of President Mohamed Bazoum to His Excellency Macky Sall and his colleagues and tell them how much he shares all of the discussions and the resolutions that will come out of this meeting.
To answer your question, I would first like to tell you that in the context of Niger we are a country that is not really an agricultural country because it is semi-desertic (sic), where agriculture is only possible in one-third of the country. Nevertheless, Niger has put in place an agricultural policy that we call the 3N Initiative, Nigeriens feeding Nigeriens, a programme which allows us to adapt agriculture to our context and increase agricultural production in such a way that the country is self-sufficient.
We have our agriculture based essentially on rainwater and this is seasonal and only falls between June and September, which means that for the rest of the year agriculture theoretically, is not possible. But Niger is working with this paradox whereby we have a lot of water underground. It’s one of the countries that has one of the greatest water reserves, globally speaking, going from one metre to one thousand metres in depth.
So our agricultural policy, the 3Ns, is focused on the increase of the production. When it comes to production during the rainy season we want to increase the yield by using the best inputs, mechanisation of agriculture and when it comes to the production after the rainy season we encourage the producers to catch water from wells and boreholes and this allows us to produce outside of the rainy season the necessary complement to the deficit of the production during the rainy season. And this is how the production outside the rainy season has moved from 100,000 tonnes to 1 million tonnes that we are looking at.
And for this, we are building dams where possible in the temporary rivers and we are boring for water where the depth is not too bad and sometimes boreholes, very deep boreholes and the deeper the borehole is the more water you have access to and you can get up to 100,000 litres per hour and we can use that for much larger surfaces for agriculture and also for livestock breeding.
So this is more or less what the 3N initiative is all about and during the compact that we are going to present in a moment we are going to be able to contribute not only to feed Nigeriens but to feed the whole of Africa. Thank you.”
Conclusion
A video of President Ruto seemingly being rebuked by a man in white dress has circulated on Facebook. The man repeatedly tells Ruto to go back to his country and accuses him of having stolen the 2022 election.
The background to the two people speaking shows the logo of a food and agriculture conference in Dakar, Senegal that was held in January 2023. Official videos from the website show that the person speaking to President Ruto is the Prime Minister of Niger, Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou, and that he spoke French throughout in the video. An official English translation also shows that the Prime Minister did not refer to events in Kenya, but spoke only about an initiative in Niger called Nigeriens Nourishing Nigeriens. The video is altered.
This fact check was published by Debunk.media with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck and African Fact-Checking Alliance.
